Speaker 1: We're recording that.
Speaker 2: We are still recording. You guys are still recording yours.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, we're good.
Speaker 3: So new news. Russell Brand of course is charged for raping. Mmm,
Speaker 3: I want to jump into this space.
Speaker 1: What space is that? The rape space?
Speaker 2: No, No, that is I didn't say that. I did
Speaker 2: not say that. I did not.
Speaker 3: I meant Russell Brand's other skill, which is which is
Speaker 3: wisdom teaching.
Speaker 4: We need to dress in linen and like.
Speaker 2: Bernie Man style.
Speaker 4: Perfect. Okay, I'll talk to this fashion perfect. I love it.
Speaker 1: It's nice.
Speaker 3: It's the podcast and I'm back on it and I'm
Speaker 3: not alone.
Speaker 2: It's uh, hey, you guys too, Eric Victor Diego. And
Speaker 2: here we are.
Speaker 3: We are catching up house things. Where was I? I
Speaker 3: was dealing with some stuff. We'll call it medical stuff.
Speaker 5: Religious religious issues.
Speaker 2: No one, No one.
Speaker 1: Died, but yeah, it's nothing like that.
Speaker 3: But I didn't know that no one was going to die,
Speaker 3: So I had like a bit of an emotional crisis.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, And that's why he had plastic surgery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a botched plastic surgery. But then they
Speaker 3: just reverted my face. That control zed and now we're.
Speaker 1: Back to normal. Yeah, and just took a bit of
Speaker 1: time for real.
Speaker 3: When I was I had to drive to the hospital
Speaker 3: every day for like a month, and the crisis uncertainty.
Speaker 3: This led me down a path that many people follow,
Speaker 3: which is they discover religion. So I've discovered religion. I'm
Speaker 3: gonna go with Buddhism.
Speaker 1: You already knew about it before, though, but you discovered.
Speaker 2: It in a no. I knew intellectually, but I felt.
Speaker 4: But you didn't know. You didn't need it.
Speaker 2: I don't need it exactly. You can know something, Yeah,
Speaker 2: you can know something but not have experienced it exactly.
Speaker 1: Knowing that knowing how you need to start.
Speaker 4: You need necessary medimum costs for religion to function.
Speaker 3: It's like when you're on when you're on mushrooms and
Speaker 3: you look at the stars when you're camping or something,
Speaker 3: and you're like, the stars are millions of light years away.
Speaker 3: I'm looking back in time and this sounds like very
Speaker 3: profound to you at the moment, But then if you
Speaker 3: explain it to someone else the next day, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I know, I know that. Yeah, but it's not the
Speaker 3: same as experiencing it.
Speaker 5: True, something sounds really cool in the moment.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I've always liked last Samurai Zen and the
Speaker 3: art of motorcycle maintenance.
Speaker 2: So I needed I needed a religion.
Speaker 3: So I just picked up the least offensive one.
Speaker 4: Why Buddhism, can I ask, Well.
Speaker 3: I read a bunch of Buddhist philosophy, which we've never
Speaker 3: touched on this podcast because we're afraid it to be racist.
Speaker 3: But I think we should just be We'll just do it.
Speaker 3: We'll just be orientalists. It's a bad word.
Speaker 4: I'm happy. I mean, I've already come out of the
Speaker 4: closet as a pro China propagandist a long time ago,
Speaker 4: so I'm already on board.
Speaker 1: Call mean, I also I feel like, I mean, maybe
Speaker 1: this is wrong, but like my feeling is that like
Speaker 1: real Buddhists, by the nature of what Buddhism, Buddhism entails,
Speaker 1: would not care about cultural appropriation. It just wouldn't make sense.
Speaker 1: It would be impossible to care about that and be
Speaker 1: a Buddhist. I think is that maybe that's wrong, but
Speaker 1: that feels like that feels true from what I know
Speaker 1: about the practice of Buddhism, because it's like that's such
Speaker 1: a stupid thing to worry about. It's just like the
Speaker 1: most it's like you're going to spend your time being outraged.
Speaker 3: The differences in like Christian denominations where they actually just
Speaker 3: fought intercontinental wars over them. Like there's like different denominations
Speaker 3: quote unquote of Buddhism, but they don't. They all think
Speaker 3: their own is right, but not to the point where
Speaker 3: they have to kill anyone who believes different things.
Speaker 1: There have been some fights in like Myanmar and stuff
Speaker 1: between like the but that's only because the Buddhists, I think,
Speaker 1: get attacked by other religions.
Speaker 5: Maybe no, the Buddhists are killing the Muslims in Oh,
Speaker 5: there's like the anti Buddhists or the anti Muslim my
Speaker 5: end more. Yes, generally generally peaceful.
Speaker 6: But uh yeah, every weird too.
Speaker 1: Is that my imagination? Sorry to be bringing more audio
Speaker 1: issues that. Maybe it's normal. Sorry, I mean my imagination
Speaker 1: just ignormal.
Speaker 6: Oh maybe not.
Speaker 2: Okay, we're fixing there, we go.
Speaker 1: Oh that's better.
Speaker 2: Okay, Shit, it's okay, guys. Everything is nothing.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not like it's not like we
Speaker 1: did a bunch of episodes without you somehow, and.
Speaker 5: Yeah you came back, you come back, and now all
Speaker 5: our settings are fucked.
Speaker 6: This can't be at the incidents.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I've gone out to the wilderness.
Speaker 3: I've gone out to the spirit realm, and now I
Speaker 3: come back and there's lights flickering.
Speaker 2: The coffee maker wouldn't turn on.
Speaker 3: I'm just fucking up electronics stuff because my my chie
Speaker 3: is radiating out here. No, but before, just because just
Speaker 3: because Buddhists say they're Buddhists doesn't mean that they're good people.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean that they follow the religion that they follow.
Speaker 3: A person's declared religion is is. It doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 3: it's there truly what they believe in any sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've been looking into Buddhism a little bit from
Speaker 5: art history perspective, because a lot of well, the ap
Speaker 5: art history courses that American high school students might take
Speaker 5: involves lots of works of art that are Buddhists, and
Speaker 5: Buddhism is well. It's interesting because when you study all
Speaker 5: the different kinds of art expressions from Judaism and Islam
Speaker 5: and Christianity, and then you look at the Buddhist stuff
Speaker 5: like Tibetan Buddhism and how that stuff, you know, they
Speaker 5: build these Buddhists that these Buddhist statues that represent the
Speaker 5: original Buddha or the transcendent Buddha or and they have
Speaker 5: all those hand positions that have all these different meanings,
Speaker 5: like calling upon the earth as witness is one of them,
Speaker 5: all that fun stuff. So I do have a bit.
Speaker 5: I haven't been thinking philosophically about religion and Buddhism on
Speaker 5: this level though.
Speaker 1: So but what aspects of Curious Pills did you find awakening?
Speaker 3: I mean just the basic practice stuff. But I want
Speaker 3: to make a distinction because it's not like Buddhism the
Speaker 3: religion that's particularly interesting. But I was looking at their philosophy,
Speaker 3: and because I was no, because I know what Zen is,
Speaker 3: I started with looking up Japanese philosophers and we've never
Speaker 3: looked at these guys.
Speaker 2: But you know, when you know the.
Speaker 3: What is it the the stories that Heidegger was talking
Speaker 3: to Japanese philosophers, maybe jack their shit.
Speaker 2: We're not sure.
Speaker 1: Well, he has that dialogue too, where it's a Japanese
Speaker 1: speaker and a German speaker going back and forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of that guy that Heidiger was talking to is
Speaker 3: a member of something called the Kyoto School, and they're
Speaker 3: they're trained in like Hegel and husserl And stuff that
Speaker 3: was popular in the thirties, forties, fifties, but they kind
Speaker 3: of melded it with there with Japanese religion, which is
Speaker 3: mostly like zen Zen Buddhism. So there they they they
Speaker 3: sound like they're husserl And and Hegel in form, but
Speaker 3: the themes are more Buddhists, like nothingness and the non self.
Speaker 3: So like Heidiger another similarity. They were writing during while
Speaker 3: while Japan.
Speaker 2: Was raping, Nanking and all that stuff, So they do
Speaker 2: get a little fasci.
Speaker 3: They do get they do get spirit and destiny of
Speaker 3: Japan against Vinity.
Speaker 4: The German idealism. Oh my god.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you just read Hegel for one hour and yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: The scene of German idealism is like, oh my god,
Speaker 4: what was the sentence? The dreams of the dreams of
Speaker 4: idealism creates monsters or something like that sounds.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I mean I think that. I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean I feel the dream of reason creates monsters,
Speaker 4: the dreams of reason, I'm crazy monsters.
Speaker 1: I feel like Japan had some feth fasci tendencies that
Speaker 1: predate uh Hegel.
Speaker 3: Shogun, another and another great Orientalist experience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's The Shogun as also a good show.
Speaker 3: This is the definition of orientalism is like, uh, In
Speaker 3: the Last Samurai, Tom Cruise is depressed and he's an
Speaker 3: alcoholic and he's feeling he's he's feeling guilt from massacring
Speaker 3: Native Americans and he goes to the samurai village. If
Speaker 3: you haven't seen it, he goes to the samurai village,
Speaker 3: watches them do their painting and do their tea and
Speaker 3: their archery and swordsmanship and all this stuff, and he
Speaker 3: fixes his own life problems. It just requires the sacrifice
Speaker 3: of every samurai to make the white man happy with himself.
Speaker 1: Again, I ever saw that Tom Cruise.
Speaker 4: That's that's so he was all worth that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Orientals all have to die so that one
Speaker 3: white man can stop drinking. This is this is like
Speaker 3: two thousand and four movie. It's not it's not that old.
Speaker 3: And then they have Showgun is kind of the same,
Speaker 3: but not as as overt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a similar storyline. And well, I was thinking
Speaker 1: about a movie that's somewhat recent that featured Japan and
Speaker 1: religion was Silence the But that doesn't really cover But
Speaker 1: that was a good one. I think it's Scorsese And
Speaker 1: it's like about the about the priests in Japan, about
Speaker 1: the expulsion of the of the Christians.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that that period Christians they were getting
Speaker 5: a bit annoying, and Japan wanted to I guess that
Speaker 5: was medieval Japan wanted to close off its borders going
Speaker 5: into the Tokugawa period.
Speaker 2: Was that like nineteenth century or something?
Speaker 1: No, No, this would have been the seventeenth sixteenth, seventeenth sixteenth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, isn't that when the shogun moved off a shogun
Speaker 3: show takes place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because shogun, because the shogun around then Tokugawa took over.
Speaker 1: He like he was the one who kind of was like,
Speaker 1: all are you Christians? Like we got to stop this.
Speaker 1: You guys are wicked annoying, Like let's let's let's get.
Speaker 7: What spoiler oops, your history spoiler treat of where Spain
Speaker 7: and Portugal divided the world between the two of them said,
Speaker 7: everything on this side it belongs to me.
Speaker 4: Everything on that side belongs to you. But then when
Speaker 4: they get to Japan, they get complicated, and since they're
Speaker 4: both Christian in a way, it gets like very very messy.
Speaker 4: But like can I direct the conversation in a direction?
Speaker 4: Do you mind like stating your definition of religion?
Speaker 3: Well, I put out to two solo episodes on just
Speaker 3: that question, and there's more to come. But religion I
Speaker 3: combined we read Durkhim. I think it was like last
Speaker 3: summer already, this stuck in my craw and it never left.
Speaker 3: But for Dirkhime, religion is about divisions. And these divisions
Speaker 3: divide up space, they divide up time. But religion always
Speaker 3: has a very specific use case, like a physical material,
Speaker 3: ordinary ordinary need that it solves it.
Speaker 2: It's a problem solver. It's a social machine that solves
Speaker 2: these problems.
Speaker 3: And if you combine this with systems theory, then you
Speaker 3: have then you can completely get rid of any universalizing
Speaker 3: tendency that religions have. Like this thing that I believe
Speaker 3: in is true, It's always been true, it will always
Speaker 3: be true in the future. You can just get rid
Speaker 3: of that if you understand religion to be a social
Speaker 3: problem solver, and then you can also divide between good
Speaker 3: and bad religion, because good religion is stuff that still
Speaker 3: solves problems. My favorite example is standing in line. It's
Speaker 3: not in your best interest to stand in line. If
Speaker 3: you're like big, you could push an old lady out
Speaker 3: of the way, you could get out of the store
Speaker 3: way quicker. But yet everyone still stands in line. This
Speaker 3: is a ritual.
Speaker 2: It's not going anywhere.
Speaker 3: It's not in everyone's best interest as individuals, but it's
Speaker 3: in the society, the social best interest of the group.
Speaker 3: And what you guys are talking about the other week
Speaker 3: about group psychology and Freud's group psychology. I mean I was,
Speaker 3: I was humming along, I was nodding alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, on lineups. I always remember whenever I go take
Speaker 1: like the VA rail train when I go back to
Speaker 1: Ottawa or when I'm coming back. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you guys have taken via rail, but I don't know.
Speaker 1: This is kind of an aside, but people always line
Speaker 1: up and I'm like, and I'm always like waiting, and
Speaker 1: I'm always just like, but we all have assigned seats,
Speaker 1: Like why are you guys lining up and just standing
Speaker 1: for I'm just gonna sit down. I'm gonna sit over here.
Speaker 1: And it's like being in line doesn't get you any
Speaker 1: benefit because like you you have your seat. It's like,
Speaker 1: I guess you'll get to your seat, like maybe a
Speaker 1: minute or two earlier if you're like at the front
Speaker 1: of the line anyway. Funny, like that's an example of
Speaker 1: group psychology where like I feel like if you just
Speaker 1: think about it for two seconds, you're like, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna fucking sit down. What the hell is the point
Speaker 1: of this?
Speaker 3: On the airplane, you line up because you want to
Speaker 3: have over yes or overhead storage.
Speaker 2: But is that true on the train too, or is
Speaker 2: it just competing?
Speaker 1: I mean the train, there's way more space. It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter on the train. Like on the train, it doesn't
Speaker 1: like there's no risk of like you missing out on anything. Yeah.
Speaker 4: There's this friend of mine that is a PhD in's aesthetics,
Speaker 4: and he's always said he has this running joke about
Speaker 4: creating a perfect society based on a shopping card shopping
Speaker 4: card return meritocracy. So we're gonna redesign society based on
Speaker 4: who returns the shopping cards because he says there's absolutely
Speaker 4: no incentive to do that. So you can judge a
Speaker 4: person by by how often does he return it, how
Speaker 4: properly he returns the shopping car to the proper space.
Speaker 4: And I think it's it's very coincidental to what Pills
Speaker 4: is trying to say, So, that's why I wanted to
Speaker 4: start with the definition of religion. We need the religion
Speaker 4: for people to return the cars to their places.
Speaker 3: Yes, returning your car is a religious activity because it's
Speaker 3: not in your it's not in your self interest, it's
Speaker 3: not in your best interest, it takes up your time.
Speaker 2: Yet you do it anyway.
Speaker 4: You don't get punishment if you don't do it, and
Speaker 4: you don't get a reward if you do it.
Speaker 5: Create a religion and then say these are the rituals
Speaker 5: you must perform to express.
Speaker 6: Your belief in this religion.
Speaker 5: One of them is returning shopping carts. The other one
Speaker 5: is lining up for the train.
Speaker 4: So now now my second question, Pills, So what's this
Speaker 4: definition of religion by like they saying, Okay, so there's
Speaker 4: a there's a societal necessity that in a way necessitates,
Speaker 4: sorry for the necessitates religion as the solution for this
Speaker 4: societal problem. But it also emerges out of what you
Speaker 4: said is material needs. So either we have a problem
Speaker 4: or a conflict or something to be solved. And how
Speaker 4: does that notion differentiate from, for example, from what we
Speaker 4: read from Auto Serrian ideology.
Speaker 3: I think I even said this when we read it.
Speaker 3: This is basically just what religion is ideology ideology, but
Speaker 3: not ideology in just the like Marxist ideology is bad,
Speaker 3: and Marx didn't really say that, but Marxist Marxists tend
Speaker 3: to say that, like ideology Twitter Marxists or even some
Speaker 3: academic Marxist But most ideology is not capitalist ideology.
Speaker 2: It's just the ideology that gets keeps society.
Speaker 3: Functioning on a data day level, like returning the shopping
Speaker 3: cart mm hmm.
Speaker 2: And then like when we get.
Speaker 3: To religion with like Jesus is his own dad, and
Speaker 3: he comes from outer space to die and then go
Speaker 3: back to outer space, and then you have like the
Speaker 3: medieval scholastics trying to deal with the substance, the substance
Speaker 3: distinction of like oh yeah, well Jesus and his father
Speaker 3: they're the same substance, but they're different modes of the
Speaker 3: same substance and all this stuff. The reason Buddhism is
Speaker 3: so superior is it's kind of an anti religious religion,
Speaker 3: like you don't have to really, you don't really have
Speaker 3: to do anything. So we've been talking about this about
Speaker 3: Japanese Buddhism, but the best thing that I discovered is
Speaker 3: this one guy Indian Indian Buddhist, like two thousand years ago,
Speaker 3: I want to say second century, but his name is
Speaker 3: Nagarjina And it's hard to read this stuff. But also
Speaker 3: when I was in my crisis, like emotionally distraught sense,
Speaker 3: the style is much like we read ancient Greeks, like
Speaker 3: the Pyrrhonists or the Naxe Mender, where it's poetic, religious
Speaker 3: and philosophy before there was any distinction between all those things.
Speaker 3: Bringing those things together on a personal level really changed
Speaker 3: my attitude towards what we're calling philosophy, because if if
Speaker 3: this is true about religion and philosophy, then what we
Speaker 3: call religion today is wrong because it doesn't it doesn't
Speaker 3: matter at all what we call philosophy in so far
Speaker 3: as it's like doing truth tables in your university office.
Speaker 2: Like that doesn't it just doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not even not even wrong, just socially useful.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I've been writing poetry and and doing gardening in
Speaker 3: a in a new way, and is that in the
Speaker 3: art of motorcycle maintenance way, And it feels different. It
Speaker 3: feels like I love something again instead of trying to Wow,
Speaker 3: trying to solve problems.
Speaker 1: So is that like, but like, it's interesting that it's
Speaker 1: like returning to practice. I guess there's like maybe it's
Speaker 1: useful to think about some kind of distinction between theory
Speaker 1: and practice because it's like the things that you just
Speaker 1: mentioned are are like you know, you're pursuing. So I
Speaker 1: guess my question this is a bit jumbled, but I'm wondering.
Speaker 1: It's like, do you think that that insight that you
Speaker 1: had is what allowed you to just like be like, hey,
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna do these things right? Or was it
Speaker 1: the doing those things that then made you be like
Speaker 1: have the insight? You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: So it's like, oh, yeah, okay, I had I had
Speaker 3: a religious experience, I had a spiritual experience. And don't worry,
Speaker 3: I'm a materialist. Do you go, don't don't get your
Speaker 3: panties at a bunch.
Speaker 4: I haven't said, I haven't set my sentence yet.
Speaker 2: No, this is definitely material conditions because I.
Speaker 4: Why, why why take away the fun from me? Biels?
Speaker 4: Why would you do that? Man? I've so much, don't
Speaker 4: make me hate you.
Speaker 3: The uncertainty caused me to do something that was completely
Speaker 3: out of character. But the religious experience, okay, the spiritual experience,
Speaker 3: I should say, a revelation even there's always happens in
Speaker 3: a crisis. You don't need a religious experience when everything's
Speaker 3: going going well. You don't need religion at all. When
Speaker 3: everything's going well. Religion is like the backstop that prevents
Speaker 3: society from collapsing in bad times, which is how it gets.
Speaker 2: So warped over time.
Speaker 3: But you know, what I experienced was like this do
Speaker 3: you do You know when you stare at a word
Speaker 3: for too long, like a single word, and then the
Speaker 3: letters start to disintegrate, the meaning goes away. Yeah, Like
Speaker 3: this happens to graphic designers all the time because you're
Speaker 3: looking at a word and you change the font and
Speaker 3: then it just it looks like shapes. Mean this dispelling
Speaker 3: of an illusion. This is what happened to me, but
Speaker 3: not with a single word. It was like I was
Speaker 3: meditating ish but suddenly language just became meaningless, like all
Speaker 3: of it. It was like I could see it disintegrating,
Speaker 3: just like the shape of a letter integrams. And this
Speaker 3: is why, you know, when you're talking about the drug experience,
Speaker 3: you can't really explain why this is significant unless you're
Speaker 3: experiencing it. So this is the disconnection from that I've
Speaker 3: been speaking about for five years. In here, it's structural linguistics.
Speaker 3: The sion eclipses the reality. Metaphors are the basic unit
Speaker 3: of meeting, not references. Language is differential. I've said all this,
Speaker 3: and I know all of this, and I've known it
Speaker 3: the whole time, but at a body level, feeling like, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what this spiritual experience was, was suddenly seeing the
Speaker 3: illusion as illusion, Like I felt like I felt like
Speaker 3: Neo and the matrix when the thing all turns to code.
Speaker 3: And then that's when I went to Buddhism Buddhist philosophy
Speaker 3: after that to try to figure out this disintegration, because
Speaker 3: what I've known about it already is like, in this
Speaker 3: meditative state, you enter only a single moment at a
Speaker 3: single time. You forget the past, you forget the future,
Speaker 3: you disintegrate the suffering really and and focus on one thing.
Speaker 1: But were you meditating purposely, Like yeah, yeah, okay, so
Speaker 1: you were, but like not necessarily based on Buddhism. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of like a more uh.
Speaker 3: No, I kind of do that all generally all the time,
Speaker 3: Like Okay, okay, fifteen minutes, half an hour a day.
Speaker 1: But I didn't I didn't know that.
Speaker 4: Cool.
Speaker 2: It's for anxiety generally, like functionally.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't know that. Cool.
Speaker 6: I think lots of people do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, It's not for me, but I've tried it.
Speaker 5: Well, here's here's an interesting thing. So I did look
Speaker 5: a little bit into what Freud is saying about religion,
Speaker 5: and he kind of makes some general remarks that fit
Speaker 5: in with what you're saying. You know, I think they
Speaker 5: fit in because he gives, you know, religion three functions.
Speaker 5: One of them is similar to science. It you know,
Speaker 5: satisfies our need to know knowledge, you know, So it
Speaker 5: talks about origin stories, It talks about the universe, the
Speaker 5: order of things, origins of phenomena, It explains things in
Speaker 5: it in that function it shares with science, right, it
Speaker 5: tries to explain. But and then a function it has
Speaker 5: that it doesn't really share with science is to comfort. Right,
Speaker 5: what you're saying kind of like it's like a backstop.
Speaker 5: And in situations where there's crises and religion acts as
Speaker 5: a well, there is there's a comfort function, right, like
Speaker 5: God the Father will protect you, you know, and and
Speaker 5: ensure that through the ups and downs and bumps of
Speaker 5: life it will all end well, like like a mystery
Speaker 5: cult or something like that. Right, it promises you wealth
Speaker 5: in the afterlife, like the Elosinian mysteries in ancient Greece.
Speaker 5: Wealth and prosperity in the afterlife, though not this life,
Speaker 5: because this one can go either way. And then then
Speaker 5: the third function is the ethical one, like when you're
Speaker 5: talking about standing in lines, right, it also you know,
Speaker 5: the Father will protect us and God. The Father also
Speaker 5: prescribes certain behaviors you have to perform, and if you
Speaker 5: perform these behaviors, it's you know, it's it's the the
Speaker 5: ethical function, this third function of religion, which again is
Speaker 5: not overlapping with science too much. A little bit with
Speaker 5: moral philosophy, but with science, the only thing they're going
Speaker 5: to prescribe to you is like a method of research,
Speaker 5: to how to research things, how to behave in that
Speaker 5: sense as a scientist, but not in your daily life
Speaker 5: towards other people.
Speaker 6: So much so.
Speaker 5: Freud sees those three sort of general functions, and there's
Speaker 5: some distinctions with and philosophy to philosophy doesn't have the
Speaker 5: power over tons of people that religion does. Philosophy has
Speaker 5: always been for a small echelon of people, and it
Speaker 5: tries to present a system, right, like if you look
Speaker 5: at the Kantient system or the one I look at
Speaker 5: like Charles purs, it tries to present to you this
Speaker 5: whole system. Science doesn't seem to care to do that.
Speaker 5: It's okay, just investigating phenomena that are fragmentary. I mean,
Speaker 5: there is all that theory of everything physicist crap.
Speaker 6: But that's I don't know.
Speaker 5: Maybe that'll go somewhere someday, but not yet, doesn't.
Speaker 3: Freud also describe one of the origin points of belief
Speaker 3: in God is the oceanic when the aspects of the
Speaker 3: world fall away and you kind of see I mean,
Speaker 3: this is kind of what I just described, Like everything
Speaker 3: seems like one thing and you're in awe. You're in
Speaker 3: awe of it, and this produces this is like a
Speaker 3: kind of it's a kind of religious experience.
Speaker 4: Sublime in a sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: He well, he talks a lot about I mean, there's
Speaker 5: so many parallels in psychoanalysis between like the development of
Speaker 5: an individual person and the development of like civilization as
Speaker 5: a whole. Right, So it's like sort of civilization finding
Speaker 5: its father figure, separating itself from the mother. Right when
Speaker 5: you're a kid and before you've sort of even mentally
Speaker 5: developed the capacity to separate, you are part of the mother, right,
Speaker 5: You're not separated from the breast. And that that is
Speaker 5: a kind of individual equivalent of the oceanic social consciousness,
Speaker 5: right where where we don't regard ourselves as separate individuals.
Speaker 5: We're all connected somehow spiritually, we are all one, the
Speaker 5: oceanic consciousness, which actually I think is more in was
Speaker 5: it Christopher Isherwood and the Bag of a Gita and
Speaker 5: those sorts of those sorts of kind of non non
Speaker 5: Western religious ideas. I guess the Oceanic is coming. I
Speaker 5: mean I've read some Christopher isher Would fiction too, and.
Speaker 6: He's into that sort of stuff.
Speaker 5: But anyway, yeah, yeah, Freud ego oceanic. Like there's, yeah,
Speaker 5: the separation from the mother stuff that's in there.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious about the like maybe the what is
Speaker 1: the concrete content or the more positive content within Buddhism,
Speaker 1: because you said you kind of had this like quasi
Speaker 1: religious experience or religious experience and then that led you
Speaker 1: to Buddhism. So then like when we think about what
Speaker 1: actually are the sort of what is the account that
Speaker 1: Buddhism gives. I mean, I know a little bit about it,
Speaker 1: but like, have you found that additionally useful? And then
Speaker 1: I guess another question would be, like how does this
Speaker 1: shift sort of change your attitude to maybe like other
Speaker 1: philosophy we might we might talk about on the podcast,
Speaker 1: like has it changed your attitude or not really towards it,
Speaker 1: Like obviously you're still going to think that some philosophy
Speaker 1: is a waste of time. I'm just curious about that.
Speaker 2: Buddhists don't all agree.
Speaker 3: There's like three major traditions and I don't know anything
Speaker 3: about any of them.
Speaker 1: I just like, I just like, but there must be
Speaker 1: some shared sort of central claims.
Speaker 3: I just like samurai, you know, because they are they're
Speaker 3: good at swords, and they make tea and do calligraphy.
Speaker 3: They do this is this is this is well, this
Speaker 3: is what will save the young men who are grasping
Speaker 3: for meaning in the west.
Speaker 4: And andrew a sword, right, so they like, Yeah.
Speaker 3: The one I think he's considered pretty much like the
Speaker 3: Aristotle of the Buddhist traditions is this guy that I mentioned,
Speaker 3: uh Indian Nagarjuna, and he is, Look, I can't I
Speaker 3: can't read this except project my experience of philosophy onto it.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna not apologize about it and just do it.
Speaker 3: He is the anti Aristotle. He says exactly the opposite
Speaker 3: thing of Aristotle, and sounds far more like a post structuralist.
Speaker 3: He sounds far more like someone like Dari Da reading
Speaker 3: hegel which is the thing that you think is in here,
Speaker 3: the thing that you think is holding all of this up,
Speaker 3: it's actually it's not there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Nagarjuna's his main book is called the Madyamaka. And
Speaker 3: I don't think we know anything about like if he lived,
Speaker 3: or if he's a real guy, if he's a group
Speaker 3: of people.
Speaker 2: It's that kind of that kind of person.
Speaker 3: But there's a there's the the people who's arguing against
Speaker 3: which are I guess the proto Hindu religion, like the Upanishads.
Speaker 3: Those those guys, they believe that there's these essences, there's
Speaker 3: substance or shit, I don't know what the word is.
Speaker 3: That's that's the thing that makes everything what it is.
Speaker 3: And you can see, like the Scholastics loved this from
Speaker 3: Aristotle because it meant that God, God has put things
Speaker 3: all in their place, he had organized everything perfectly. And
Speaker 3: then of course that that physical phenomena is explained by
Speaker 3: things being things, which is why you know fire goes
Speaker 3: up because the fires is up there, and the rocks
Speaker 3: go down because the thingness of rock is down there.
Speaker 2: Things are things, Yes, exactly, things are things.
Speaker 3: But the Gardona says he actually goes through arguments, so
Speaker 3: it's it's not like a religious text, it's an argumentative
Speaker 3: text saying there is no It's like Parmenides, right, there's
Speaker 3: no there's no movement. If you break things or if
Speaker 3: you break things into pieces, there's no movement.
Speaker 2: You can't have an arrow flying. It's impossible. It's that
Speaker 2: kind of thing.
Speaker 3: But he's against Yeah, the Swababa as being an explanation
Speaker 3: for what's happening. So he I found like I found
Speaker 3: my brother from two thousand years on the other side
Speaker 3: of the world. Because he's he's an anti realist. He says,
Speaker 3: social codes, they're all fictional, they're all conventional, but you
Speaker 3: might as well believe in them anyway.
Speaker 4: Yeah they matter, they're fictional that they matter, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: So this is like you're speaking of my soul. Here
Speaker 3: he says the self is an illusion. I've been saying
Speaker 3: that from from a post structuralist perspective. This is all
Speaker 3: stuff that he's hid two thousand years ago. There are
Speaker 3: no substances, there's only change. So all this stuff is,
Speaker 3: you know, things I believe, but it's coming from from
Speaker 3: second century India.
Speaker 4: I mentioned this a couple of times in the past
Speaker 4: episode that you were not here, Pells. But I read
Speaker 4: this piece from Freud very late one, the one on
Speaker 4: Moses and Monotism. I don't know if if you guys
Speaker 4: have any chance to read into it. But what I
Speaker 4: find reading you.
Speaker 2: Mean Moses, Moses, the Burning Bush, Moses.
Speaker 4: Moses from Judaism.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the guy.
Speaker 4: Moses and Monotism. I read it in Spanish. Sorry if
Speaker 4: the translation fails. But what it's cool is that there
Speaker 4: was this guy in Egypt Amon, and it was the
Speaker 4: first one to propose a monotheistic new structure of belief
Speaker 4: in Egypt.
Speaker 2: I think we say at Acanatin.
Speaker 4: Is that exactly? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I have no idea he invented monotheism.
Speaker 4: Exactly, that guy. Okay, so he invented monotism for that
Speaker 4: he was killed, right he was, then he was, he
Speaker 4: tried to escape, and then he tried again to create
Speaker 4: monotaism outside. And why I think this story is interesting
Speaker 4: in a way is that because religious symbolic order organizes
Speaker 4: archiemedian points for truth to be established. So you have
Speaker 4: the god of rain, the God of thunder, the God
Speaker 4: of but then any any of one of those individual gods.
Speaker 4: They act as an archaemedium point to organize the possibility
Speaker 4: of truth to exist because they are an outside pivot
Speaker 4: point for people to affirm that yes it's raining, Yes,
Speaker 4: this is why thunders exist. Yes, this is why are
Speaker 4: not growing. Yes, this is why we are attacked by animals. Yes,
Speaker 4: this is why we had a plague. So by monotism,
Speaker 4: what it does it centralizes everything in one archaemedian point,
Speaker 4: in one point that it's able to hold everything else
Speaker 4: in its place so that truth can emerge. So it's
Speaker 4: weird to see the breathing between monotism and politicism in history.
Speaker 4: And and according to me, what I like about your
Speaker 4: explanation is that we could do a reading of that
Speaker 4: based on necessity, as when we are in need, we
Speaker 4: centralize gods that enable truth, like QAnon, Trump, the deep state.
Speaker 4: You know, we we we create those gods and we
Speaker 4: use them to organize the possibility of truth to emerge.
Speaker 4: But if you, if you, if you take a broader
Speaker 4: look from outside of it, as you said, if we
Speaker 4: apply system theory to it, what we see is that
Speaker 4: all of those were always fake, but they were necessary
Speaker 4: and their function was even if if the truth they
Speaker 4: were asserting was based on a fake god, because they
Speaker 4: were all made up in the sense the the the use,
Speaker 4: the use they produce on the world was real, like
Speaker 4: the effect they produce on the world was real. That
Speaker 4: does it make any sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I was.
Speaker 3: I've been trying for years to think of a way
Speaker 3: to break left versus right as basically our only political description,
Speaker 3: and this one actually does this because Trumpists and trump
Speaker 3: Beans and Qanonists, they're not anti society. They are pro social,
Speaker 3: just like just like the liberals on the other side
Speaker 3: or the communist kids on the internet. Everyone is actually
Speaker 3: pro social, that's true. We disagree on who's in there.
Speaker 3: We disagree on the type of social you know, we
Speaker 3: disagree that that certain people are toxins that need to
Speaker 3: be purged with horse de wormer from society or sent
Speaker 3: to sent to al Salvador met. Everyone agrees on one thing,
Speaker 3: and that's like society is important.
Speaker 2: We need to protect it.
Speaker 3: It's going through a rough time, and we have a
Speaker 3: we have to fix this, like this has to be solved.
Speaker 2: So left right, I guess.
Speaker 3: They they're reasonable distinctions, but they concern you know, who
Speaker 3: needs to die so that we can have the society
Speaker 3: that we need.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but we want Yeah, didn't when Freud was talking
Speaker 5: about Moses in Egypt too, wasn't wasn't it that at
Speaker 5: that time when monotheism supposedly came about as the Sun
Speaker 5: god worship thing. Uh, it was also at a time
Speaker 5: of like Egyptian empire imperialism, right, Like it became the
Speaker 5: sort of religion of an imperialist kind of nation that
Speaker 5: was emerging. And so suddenly you have this sort of
Speaker 5: shift from these this pluralist, polytheistic religions to a monotheistic
Speaker 5: religion which reflects you know, okay, great, we have this
Speaker 5: story now where there's one God and he is the
Speaker 5: king over everybody, and that's reflected here on earth where
Speaker 5: we want one empire that is the that is you know,
Speaker 5: by God whatever wherever it is here now it's in Egypt,
Speaker 5: and later it's in Europe wherever it is, because kings
Speaker 5: love to think about themselves as divinely ordained and okay,
Speaker 5: one global empire kind of model. So like, I mean,
Speaker 5: I don't know if there is that connection between monotheism
Speaker 5: and empire building. But then Freud's other thing when he's
Speaker 5: talking about where where is this all this anti semitism
Speaker 5: coming from? Again, that's that's connected there. The shift from
Speaker 5: polytheism to an enforced monotheism produced resentment amongst many of
Speaker 5: the remaining polytheist peoples, like the I guess the Germanic tribes,
Speaker 5: many of whom became monotheistic after the Fall of.
Speaker 6: Rome and whatnot throughout Europe.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, like forced monotheism created this historical resentment
Speaker 5: that persisted. And there's a relationship to the guilt as well,
Speaker 5: in the attempt of Jesus to come along and expiate
Speaker 5: the guilt.
Speaker 6: For the for that.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, there's it's an expression of a kind
Speaker 5: of I mean, that's one thing he connects it to
Speaker 5: the real the return to paganism as a kind of
Speaker 5: lingering resentment over monotheistic religions, whether it's Christianity or Judaism.
Speaker 4: And this we can connect to Nazism because in a way,
Speaker 4: what National Socialist Party was trying to do was to
Speaker 4: coil back from Christianism into paganism, like into the original
Speaker 4: values of the Germanic tribes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and and what's interesting about even polytheistic, pagan whatever
Speaker 5: religions is that even still there's usually one figure. There's
Speaker 5: tons of gods, but usually one of them is responsible
Speaker 5: for creating everything, but they're just that one's just not
Speaker 5: identified as like the supreme god, right like Zeus didn't
Speaker 5: create the world, but he is the youngest he's the
Speaker 5: youngest child of Chronos, who eventually overthrows him. And then
Speaker 5: he figures out a way to stop that cycle of
Speaker 5: overthrowing by what was it, like he I think I
Speaker 5: had to do with taking Athena inside of himself, giving
Speaker 5: birth to Athena himself out of his head in order
Speaker 5: to stop the cycle of one of his you know,
Speaker 5: someone else having a kid that's going to overthrow him
Speaker 5: kind of whatever, whatever the specifics of that. But yeah,
Speaker 5: there's usually a creator figure in the polytheistic religions anyway.
Speaker 4: So now that we have established like a cool definition
Speaker 4: to discuss about religion and this notion about the necessity
Speaker 4: of religion, the difference between religion and ideology. You made
Speaker 4: another claim that was very interesting to me. And then
Speaker 4: again your preference for Buddhism as the religion that you
Speaker 4: will choose, and you made this interesting claim about your
Speaker 4: reading of Marisman Ruponti as a Buddhist. How would you
Speaker 4: justify that.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, we should read this soon, his religious text,
Speaker 3: like we've we've read pretty thoroughly, I think on this
Speaker 3: podcast of Phenomenology Perception. Yeah, it's like eight hundred pages, but.
Speaker 2: We've done a lot of it, twenty episodes, fifteen.
Speaker 1: Twenty probably not that much. We've probably done like maybe
Speaker 1: eight to ten.
Speaker 4: And it's pretty good. I think somebody mentioned it on
Speaker 4: the chat that is I think it's the one philosopher
Speaker 4: where we all the four of us like agree upon yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But also before he died and I did a patron
Speaker 3: video on this like five years ago, but he wrote
Speaker 3: a book called uh. I think it's a collection. It's
Speaker 3: called The Invisible and the Invisible Or is it a
Speaker 3: total or is it a total book?
Speaker 1: I forget, it's an unfinished book.
Speaker 5: I think the chiasmus or the intertwining.
Speaker 1: I felt like the flesh and the chasm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the intertwining or the kiasm is like it. It's
Speaker 3: sounds religious, and this is from like a or it
Speaker 3: sounds I don't know, spiritual.
Speaker 2: Maybe we should.
Speaker 3: It sounds spiritual, but it's written by a guy who's
Speaker 3: like studying bodies and rehabilitation of bodies, and it's it's
Speaker 3: where he ends up with that. I think he's on
Speaker 3: a similar trajectory of trying to find out, like what
Speaker 3: what perception really means, because perception spiritually spiritually and I
Speaker 3: mean spiritually not as opposed to material, because that's normally
Speaker 3: how we think of spirit material spiritual, the spirit world
Speaker 3: is felt false. All that is true, but also the
Speaker 3: way that the illusions come together. So we were talking
Speaker 3: before about the word that disintegrates in meaning if you
Speaker 3: stare at it too long. Now, the disintegration of meaning,
Speaker 3: this is like more close to the real state. But
Speaker 3: the fact that words have meaning every time we see them,
Speaker 3: this is like a This is the spiritual world that
Speaker 3: we live in, this world of illusions, and the most
Speaker 3: spiritual we can get, I guess is to then de
Speaker 3: metaphorize or de abstract the things that we go on
Speaker 3: believing all the time, so that you can actually really
Speaker 3: believe in them. Because if you find if you realize
Speaker 3: that you're just mapping your meaning onto the world and
Speaker 3: that it's not really there, that kind of makes the
Speaker 3: world a very interesting place and even a more interesting place.
Speaker 3: It's worth being curious about everything you see, because you
Speaker 3: are seeing your sight of the world rather than the
Speaker 3: world itself.
Speaker 4: As if we are comfortable in the illusion, but we
Speaker 4: need to recognize that we are in the illusion so
Speaker 4: we can properly treat it in the seriousness of the
Speaker 4: illusion and the necessity of the illusion.
Speaker 3: We also have to overthrow Catholicism. We've been about overthrowing
Speaker 3: capitalism for a couple of years.
Speaker 2: But JD.
Speaker 3: Vance and Denin and the Dimes square kids. I think
Speaker 3: the Heglian the Hegelian egleles are doing egle Catholicism now,
Speaker 3: I think are they really?
Speaker 2: Don't quote me on that, I think I saw it.
Speaker 2: But Buddhism.
Speaker 3: Buddhism is the only answer to Catholicism because it says
Speaker 3: the substances they're not real, they're just conventions. Thomas Aquinas right,
Speaker 3: Thomas aquinas the Catholic philosopher, finish all his ship the
Speaker 3: Suma theological and at the end of his life, you
Speaker 3: remember what he said, all my works, I consider them
Speaker 3: to be as straw my works, My works are nothing.
Speaker 3: This is the time in his life that he had
Speaker 3: a true insight, but no one takes him seriously as
Speaker 3: a primary source on the value of his work because
Speaker 3: they're still doing they're still doing Akwinian.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've always felt like the Catholics. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, they freak me out. I mean, I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: like all that anti Catholic hatred that was going on
Speaker 1: in the in the like the forties and whatever, like
Speaker 1: through the in America, Like maybe they were onto something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they had it right.
Speaker 3: These people want to like they're really obsessed with sex
Speaker 3: and disciplining the body.
Speaker 2: It's scary, it's freaky.
Speaker 1: I think they're the most dangerous to all. The most
Speaker 1: crazy Supreme Court justices in the US are Catholics.
Speaker 2: Catholics and converts too.
Speaker 4: The fact that the occident is falling apart and Catholicism
Speaker 4: is not being able to hold it together, it's a
Speaker 4: living fact that we need to overcome it.
Speaker 1: I'm interested though, pills in this sort of post structuralist
Speaker 1: insight that you mentioned that you felt like this sort
Speaker 1: of this Indian Buddhist that you discovered. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of compatibility, so kind of you know, you're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is stuff I already believe, but I get I
Speaker 1: think what I'm interest and then it led you to
Speaker 1: these practices, right, You're like, I want to garden, make art,
Speaker 1: write poetry, you know, but I'm curious about.
Speaker 2: Like, doesn't that section doesn't that sound so crity?
Speaker 4: It sounds very crazy crazy, It sounds amazing.
Speaker 5: It sounds crazy, it sounds it sounds like a beautiful garden.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a cliche. But but but like hearing
Speaker 1: you talk about it, actually it makes me really happy.
Speaker 1: It makes me really happy that you're doing that though,
Speaker 1: because I know that that if you're doing it, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's you're getting a lot out of it.
Speaker 2: It is so cliche.
Speaker 3: That's like, oh, white white boy found Samurai shit and they're.
Speaker 1: Exactly and then started gardening.
Speaker 5: But but my question another yoga dad, But my question.
Speaker 1: Is like the connection between the sort of post structuralist
Speaker 1: insights if any like so you're like, Okay, this is
Speaker 1: a religion, and and they believe the things that I believe.
Speaker 1: And then how do you leap to the practice? I
Speaker 1: guess because it's like, you know, like obviously in Western philosophy,
Speaker 1: post structuralists are sometimes accused and are also like not
Speaker 1: only skeptical of, but sometimes hostile to like prescriptions. Right,
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying you're following any prescriptions, right, it's
Speaker 1: but like, you know, how do you, like, what's the
Speaker 1: connection between those material those like that description of material
Speaker 1: reality or the lack thereof? And therefore I should I
Speaker 1: should just chill and just do the things that make
Speaker 1: me happy, Like where's the action that follows from it?
Speaker 1: If any Like I'm just curious about that.
Speaker 2: How do you how do you invent ritual when you
Speaker 2: know the rituals? False?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 3: So I mean you just got to do it, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, if you if you got I can't. I
Speaker 3: can't teach like you how I live. But eventually you
Speaker 3: get sort of a strategy down and then you realize
Speaker 3: what's happening. It's like getting good at a sport. If
Speaker 3: you're good at a sport, if you're good at a sport.
Speaker 3: You know what's going on everywhere on the floor, you
Speaker 3: know what could happen.
Speaker 2: You know it might happen. You don't have to solve
Speaker 2: certain problems.
Speaker 4: And this is very much more risma luponia. Yeah exactly,
Speaker 4: this is this is.
Speaker 1: My right, Yeah for sure, yeah, exactly. Well the practice
Speaker 1: part the action part is connected. But just to you,
Speaker 1: like where my question is also sort of coming from
Speaker 1: is we've also covered kind of existentialism on this podcast before,
Speaker 1: and there's like a whole debate about you know, existentialist ethics, right,
Speaker 1: like what comes from it, what action follows from it?
Speaker 1: And I think in a way, like I felt like
Speaker 1: something similar comes out of it in a way that
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, there's nothing, but then you can
Speaker 1: you know, it's like in the practice in the action,
Speaker 1: but you know, I don't know if it's if there's something,
Speaker 1: but like Buddhism itself is pretty ritualistic or it can be,
Speaker 1: but I don't know that much about it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you wanted to say more about
Speaker 1: about about don't.
Speaker 4: Kill people, don't steal shed, don't disrespect the main God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's true, it's it's true.
Speaker 3: That that's what every religion says at bottom. It says
Speaker 3: respect society, respect tradition, and don't hurt other.
Speaker 2: People for no reason.
Speaker 3: And you could simplify that even more. I think, to
Speaker 3: what Victor's asking, do good and avoid evil? And what
Speaker 3: you're asking here, Victor, I think I answer in an
Speaker 3: intentionally merely Pontian way, because I know you like that stuff.
Speaker 3: But to do good is not a moral charge in Buddhism,
Speaker 3: or at least.
Speaker 2: The Zen emphasis in Buddhism. I don't know about the
Speaker 2: rest of it.
Speaker 3: But do good does not mean be morally good and
Speaker 3: be charitable at all. It means get good at things,
Speaker 3: and you will discover peace in those activities. That's why
Speaker 3: you have warriors who also do calligraphy and make tea,
Speaker 3: and monks who clean and make pottery like they're getting
Speaker 3: good at what it means to be human, which is
Speaker 3: focus and attention and consciousness basically. And then you can ask, well,
Speaker 3: what's the evil to avoid? What's the bad part about
Speaker 3: being human? Well, for them, it's being worried, distracted all
Speaker 3: the time, getting into fights, causing chaos, dwelling on things
Speaker 3: you can't change. That is the evil. To avoid when
Speaker 3: you say do good and avoid evil, and obviously this
Speaker 3: seems more reletive to us then obviously demons trying to
Speaker 3: attack us. The evil is the things that make you
Speaker 3: not at peace, and the good is the avenues towards
Speaker 3: inner peace, because that is where you're at your most human.
Speaker 5: I always, whenever I think back to Hidegger, you say Buddhism,
Speaker 5: I think back to Hidegger's stuff about like sheltering the void,
Speaker 5: all right, because this isn't that very if Buddhism has
Speaker 5: anything true. Yeah, yeah, it's coming in you know, the
Speaker 5: Romantics getting into Eastern mysticism and all that. Yeah, but
Speaker 5: I mean the idea of sheltering the void. I mean,
Speaker 5: in so far I don't know that this in so
Speaker 5: far as Buddhism does have a cosmology, is that not
Speaker 5: kind of it though?
Speaker 6: Too?
Speaker 5: There's like a kind of nothingness.
Speaker 1: And that's why I think there's actually overlap with with
Speaker 1: Lacinian psychoanalysis too. I think in Buddhism, just like the desire,
Speaker 1: like the that's a part, like the perpetual, the repetition. Well,
Speaker 1: not just Lacinian, but like psychoanalysis in general. I think
Speaker 1: Buddhism is from my limited knowledge good at talking about
Speaker 1: the kind of repetitive patterns.
Speaker 5: And I think, as opposed to you know, like the
Speaker 5: existentialist primordial choice, freedom seems very different, and it is different,
Speaker 5: and the whole idea of existence seems to suggest to
Speaker 5: me kind of solid things, embodied minds, Whereas if you're
Speaker 5: questioning substance in general, then what the hell is this
Speaker 5: embodied practice? What the hell is this body thing that
Speaker 5: practice is embodied in. If we're not very if we're sheltering,
Speaker 5: if we're walking around sheltering.
Speaker 6: Voids all day, I don't know if that's.
Speaker 5: Probably neither here nor there, but that's the Yeah, the
Speaker 5: later hidigary and stuff kind of swings in that direction,
Speaker 5: doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for merlu Ponti, I think Amy doesn't say this directly,
Speaker 3: of course, but you can infer from his text that
Speaker 3: to be a good human is to find a few
Speaker 3: activities and get very good at them. That's when you're
Speaker 3: that's when you're most not like a subject, it's when
Speaker 3: you're the most in the world. And that's kind of
Speaker 3: the thing like one of the busies, Uh, could we.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because there's this there's this book about the concept
Speaker 4: of man in Marx and it's from I think it's
Speaker 4: it's Eric From. I think it's from Eric From and
Speaker 4: he writes about this notion about finding true the true
Speaker 4: essence of men in working and like in stuff that
Speaker 4: you're good at and you work and you transform nature
Speaker 4: and that's the true essence of men.
Speaker 3: Yeah, chopping down trees, go and fishing, write in philosophy.
Speaker 3: But the yeah, the one of the biggest concepts in
Speaker 3: Buddhism that I've mentioned here is that the self is
Speaker 3: an illusion. But that doesn't mean that you just don't
Speaker 3: do you don't be a self, or you don't believe
Speaker 3: that other people have selves, because again, conventionally, it's a
Speaker 3: very useful.
Speaker 2: Thing to believe.
Speaker 3: You need you need to have like laws that are
Speaker 3: about protecting people from getting attacked by other people, and
Speaker 3: for that you need to assume that there's like a
Speaker 3: coherence to a person. But ultimately, you know, you're just
Speaker 3: the same stuff that every everything else is, which is
Speaker 3: change and movement and particles that come in, particles that
Speaker 3: go out. There's no substance even in like the particle
Speaker 3: is not a substance, right, the particle is changing the
Speaker 3: substance even in Aristotelian like special substance or platonic form.
Speaker 3: These are things that can't change. Everything else changes around
Speaker 3: those things, whereas this is where you get the Madyamica
Speaker 3: is the title of this guy in now Gardina's book,
Speaker 3: and it means middle way.
Speaker 2: That's not talking about out of my ass But.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure, if I recall correctly from the intro
Speaker 3: to his book, that the middle way is through nihilism
Speaker 3: on one hand, and through believing that subs since these
Speaker 3: are real, on the other hand.
Speaker 2: So he's a.
Speaker 3: Centrist, he's a he's an ontological centrist. But it sounds
Speaker 3: really nehilistic to I guess Westerners, because we're we have
Speaker 3: a latent belief that there are substances, substances below things
Speaker 3: or forms above things, and it's been an assumption of
Speaker 3: our philosophy for basically up to the twentieth century.
Speaker 4: Excluding including excluding some thinkers in history.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. But one of the biggest things is
Speaker 3: like language has meaning. This is something everyone believes in in.
Speaker 2: Some way or another.
Speaker 3: But to believe that that meaning is real, that's the
Speaker 3: thing that I've been saying with my mind. I don't
Speaker 3: believe and that's the thing that like a month ago
Speaker 3: I experienced with my body mind.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I think I said this the other
Speaker 4: day in like in a barbecue or not not even joking,
Speaker 4: in a Sunday barbecue, like somebody like I had this
Speaker 4: a similar experience to what you describe exactly, because I'm
Speaker 4: reading grammatology from dere Da because of the of the
Speaker 4: post the post doc, and I was having this conversation
Speaker 4: with a friend of mine, and I kept asking for
Speaker 4: every definition of every word he was using. But I
Speaker 4: was doing it, like not not on purpose, like I
Speaker 4: didn't want to annoy the guy, Like I just didn't
Speaker 4: want to assume that I knew what he was talking about.
Speaker 4: So I kept asking, though, but what do you mean
Speaker 4: about what do you what do you mean with this word?
Speaker 4: What do you mean with this? And what do you
Speaker 4: mean with that? In order to try to make sense,
Speaker 4: and and like the guy got really annoyed and he
Speaker 4: pushed me back, and like it's so hard to have
Speaker 4: conversations with you, and I'm like, dude, like you have
Speaker 4: to consider the fact that the meaning of every word
Speaker 4: is just another word. But you know, they don't really
Speaker 4: they don't refer to anything like words refer to other words.
Speaker 4: They don't refer to things. So that's why I'm I'm
Speaker 4: trying to make sense of Yeah, it's so sure, I've.
Speaker 5: Got a dictionary.
Speaker 6: I've seen it.
Speaker 2: You're being that.
Speaker 3: You're being a bad friend here because why Because good
Speaker 3: means you just accept the illusion and you you deal
Speaker 3: with what you have to to get to get on
Speaker 3: with it. And you say, I'll talk about this on
Speaker 3: the podcast later with people.
Speaker 1: That actually doesn't refer to nothing. It refers to like
Speaker 1: the social compact, like it's it's so so it plays
Speaker 1: a game in a social compact. It's not just nothing.
Speaker 4: I didn't I didn't say nothing.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, okay, well nothing in so far as it's
Speaker 2: not substantial.
Speaker 1: It's a conceptual in so far as so the social
Speaker 1: has no substance.
Speaker 5: Now now we're get now we're getting into the semiotic territory.
Speaker 5: But yeah, the we need a lot, we need a
Speaker 5: different vocabulary that like the self being an illusion and
Speaker 5: meaning being real, Like what the hell I don't know
Speaker 5: about any of that stuff, you know, Okay, the self
Speaker 5: could be an illusion in the sense that it's derivative
Speaker 5: of a more primary relation, like a chiasm, where it's
Speaker 5: more the relation in itself is more primary than the
Speaker 5: two things that are related taken individually. That's kind of
Speaker 5: a relational way of thinking, which makes sense, I guess
Speaker 5: and even ancient I always bring it up. He Sei
Speaker 5: Odd's theogony right in the beginning was chaos, and not
Speaker 5: chaos in the sense of disorder, but chaos in the
Speaker 5: sense of a gap, chasm, chiasm, that kind of chiasmus.
Speaker 6: Right, that's so, there's.
Speaker 5: That, but I mean meaning being real. Right, It's like
Speaker 5: with Victor said, it's a compact, right, we agree on
Speaker 5: what things mean, and when I use words and you
Speaker 5: use words and we think they mean different things, and
Speaker 5: we're gonna have trouble talking. First you have to we
Speaker 5: have to learn what everyone Like If I agree to
Speaker 5: meet you at the store in twenty minutes and in
Speaker 5: ten minutes I got go, is that agreement real?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 6: What the hell do I mean by that?
Speaker 2: Does that?
Speaker 4: Know?
Speaker 5: It just means of are we on the same fucking
Speaker 5: page about this still? Or are you gonna forget and
Speaker 5: go to the mall and forget.
Speaker 1: To meet me?
Speaker 4: With the podcast a couple of times, the.
Speaker 6: Whole Yeah, the whole.
Speaker 5: I and then oh my god, is the podcast real?
Speaker 5: I don't start thinking that way, because we need a
Speaker 5: better vocabulary to talk about meanings and words and illusions
Speaker 5: and fictions and realities and solid things. If only solid
Speaker 5: things are real, or is something else real too?
Speaker 3: Like patterns and solid things are solid enough, but you
Speaker 3: shouldn't put undying faith in them.
Speaker 5: You can put you can find all the little gaps
Speaker 5: inside of the so little solid things, and then in
Speaker 5: those gaps are smaller thing. It's like an iHeart Huckebees
Speaker 5: kind of argument.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Or the concept of the storm from the loose,
Speaker 4: you know, like this notion of like when does the
Speaker 4: storm start and when does the storm end? Like how
Speaker 4: many of the thunders are part of the storm being considered?
Speaker 4: And like the stability of concepts, they vary in time
Speaker 4: and most of the time, the way we relate to
Speaker 4: the things that we're pretending to mention, it's asynchronicle. But
Speaker 4: that synchronicity works like it has a level of stability,
Speaker 4: but it's never fully stable.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and all this is why a book called The
Speaker 5: Meaning of Meaning came out in the nineteen twenties, and
Speaker 5: there's like twenty eight different definitions of the word meaning
Speaker 5: that's awesome, because it's because it's a silly word.
Speaker 2: I thought you going to say maps of meaning there.
Speaker 5: No, No, that's a bit. That's a bit.
Speaker 3: Later, young and and uh and uh hesiod and I
Speaker 3: got maps of meaning awesome. One last thing to say
Speaker 3: about this is kind of a callback, but it functions
Speaker 3: here well. If you consider monotheism and it's parallel structure
Speaker 3: to fascism, we have fear, Dear Leader. Monotheism works functionally
Speaker 3: very well because as society grows in complexity, you need
Speaker 3: an inverse to how difficult decisions are to make. Like
Speaker 3: democracy is very easy in your family if you're like,
Speaker 3: where should we go to dinner?
Speaker 2: Well, we'll we'll vote on it. Very easy in that way.
Speaker 3: But if you get a large group of people with
Speaker 3: conflicting interests, the the functionally simplest thing to do, which
Speaker 3: is kind of the Trump administration's uh debt right now,
Speaker 3: is put all the power into one person, and we
Speaker 3: can actually get ship done if we if we have
Speaker 3: a if we have a system of the fear, basically
Speaker 3: we can get things done. But this is I would
Speaker 3: I would guess I would speculate that that monotheism emerges
Speaker 3: when like, we can't have the God of the Sea
Speaker 3: fighting with the God of wisdom anymore because there's there's
Speaker 3: too much conflict here.
Speaker 2: We need as as what do you call.
Speaker 3: It, streamline the streamline decision process as much as possible.
Speaker 3: And then you get like God of of Judaism yahweh.
Speaker 3: I think uh he he used to be a local god,
Speaker 3: like just like every local god. I think he was
Speaker 3: the god of the Mount Sinai where he came from
Speaker 3: something like that. They made a bull statue out of him.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's the process of abstraction functionally works Monotheism.
Speaker 1: It's like you had a doge of the gods. It's
Speaker 1: like we've got to cut the extra fat here. We've
Speaker 1: got to fire all these different gods and just settle
Speaker 1: on one.
Speaker 3: It's too inefficient, and Christianity doesn't actually believe in one
Speaker 3: god either. It's like the devil's there and the devil's
Speaker 3: doing all this stuff. But I guess he's not technically
Speaker 3: a god, but he's a he's worthy of consideration for
Speaker 3: his for his magical prowess.
Speaker 2: But you know, at all.
Speaker 5: That that kind of ruins the point I was gonna
Speaker 5: make but I was kind of just thinking it's funny
Speaker 5: how throughout history we tend to project our political systems
Speaker 5: onto our religious beliefs, right, so we when we're in
Speaker 5: the feudal system, we represent God and the heavens is
Speaker 5: like a court with a king and and and that.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, okay, I agree with that. Para authoritarianism does
Speaker 5: fit more the Christian model, right, Like, what are these democrats?
Speaker 5: They're fucking pagans, right, they want to go back to
Speaker 5: no bodies in charge, and it's just a bunch of
Speaker 5: different gods who are just like voting with each other
Speaker 5: now instead of fighting, which that's the big difference.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I.
Speaker 5: Means jokes aside, Yeah, there is there's that tendency to
Speaker 5: project our own political system, or an idealized version of it,
Speaker 5: onto the religions that are important for us.
Speaker 4: No wonder, liberal democracies are failing everywhere because there as
Speaker 4: a religion, they're unable to sustain the decay of the
Speaker 4: system itself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're trying to go back to the pagans. Not
Speaker 5: not the other way, Not the fascists. It's the Democrats
Speaker 5: who are the pagans, I guess because they've they've got
Speaker 5: a polytheistic model.
Speaker 4: It's as if democracies are polytaistic in the sense that
Speaker 4: they're several ideologies that you can plug upon and play
Speaker 4: believe and role play that you're defending a set of
Speaker 4: values and morals that defends the will of one God
Speaker 4: that is supposed to deliver utopia, versus like organizing under
Speaker 4: one single rule like no wonder leaders as putting and
Speaker 4: jishiping are like kicking ass.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like, imagine in a thousand years when all this
Speaker 5: disappears and the new religion comes around, and now it's
Speaker 5: like a democratically kind of the theology. So now are
Speaker 5: our next Bible is going to be about how how
Speaker 5: Jesus was elected by the court of the voting body
Speaker 5: of angels.
Speaker 3: Now our next Bible is going to be written in
Speaker 3: Chinese because they're they're going to win.
Speaker 4: Actually, I was gonna say that they are mostly they're
Speaker 4: they're mostly lost the word the tales. They're not believers,
Speaker 4: like in the sense that like Chinese atheists, China doesn't
Speaker 4: need religion right now, they're doing so well, why would
Speaker 4: they need religion. We need religion because we're losing, we're decaying.
Speaker 4: We need something to sustain and hold the fibers together.
Speaker 4: They're kicking asd like, they're producing a lot, they are
Speaker 4: owning technology, they're prospering like religion seems less necessary.
Speaker 3: I think that's a truism, that religion becomes necessary in crisis.
Speaker 3: So liberalism just fine, right, as long as as long
Speaker 3: as your standards of living expected at the end of
Speaker 3: your life are higher than at the beginning of your life,
Speaker 3: liberalism totally fine. The second the graph goes down or
Speaker 3: all the money is being hoovered up and transferred to
Speaker 3: the one percent and your quality of life gets worse,
Speaker 3: Now you need a religious explanation for why things are
Speaker 3: getting worse. So then it's capitalists for people of our persuasion,
Speaker 3: or it's immigrants, or it's the moral crisis of the
Speaker 3: West because we watch and we don't stick to our
Speaker 3: assigned gender roles anymore. Yeah, so you need an explanation
Speaker 3: for the downturn, and that's yeah, I'm still a materialist,
Speaker 3: don't worry about that. It's still originally just a physical
Speaker 3: experience of watching your life get worse, feeling it get worse,
Speaker 3: being worried, being anxious. Then this has to be turned
Speaker 3: into a metaphoric structure, an idiology of why it's happening,
Speaker 3: and then you have to So liberalism just says, let's
Speaker 3: keep going everything's good. As soon as things stop going good,
Speaker 3: then you need something a little more extreme.
Speaker 2: You need you need the end of the world. You
Speaker 2: need the apocalypse and the profit, the profit who will
Speaker 2: bring the end of the world for you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, when that myth of progress, when that doesn't hold
Speaker 5: up so much anymore. I mean, I mean, I guess
Speaker 5: you don't really have another life to compare your life to,
Speaker 5: but you do learn about what the world was like
Speaker 5: when your parents were younger or somebody from them, and
Speaker 5: then you can start to think, oh wow, like sounds
Speaker 5: like what I can do and afford is a lot
Speaker 5: less now.
Speaker 6: I thought the next.
Speaker 5: Generation was supposed to be better off than the previous ones.
Speaker 6: That's what I've always I.
Speaker 5: Don't know, you have to get some I mean, abstraction
Speaker 5: is just unavoidable in all of these things, right, But
Speaker 5: like society is an abstraction, and then you have to
Speaker 5: religion and all those those kinds of ideas you were saying.
Speaker 5: I think I was listening to your solo diatribe from that,
Speaker 5: but it all begins with abstraction, and we're all religious.
Speaker 3: I found this was poignant to say we're all religious
Speaker 3: because Dawkins just decided, after being the atheist, the atheist
Speaker 3: who debated Christians, who debated Muslims, who warned us against
Speaker 3: the evils, just says, yeah, socially, I'm a Christian, and
Speaker 3: he's right about that, and socially always all along he's
Speaker 3: been a Christian or just a religious person, you know.
Speaker 5: And he says it's the best one because because it's
Speaker 5: it's not inherently violent like Islam, is.
Speaker 6: What he's going to say about.
Speaker 1: Like, so, what's the name for the bad kind of religion?
Speaker 1: Because if we're all religious, but there's obviously.
Speaker 5: Just I just said it. If you're if you're Dawkins,
Speaker 5: it's Islam, if you're if you're a lot of if
Speaker 5: you're a lot of people, it's Islam. Right now, is
Speaker 5: the name for the bad one?
Speaker 3: I call them real estate religions because they have to
Speaker 3: have they have to have an income, and they have
Speaker 3: to have enough rules to make sure that they don't
Speaker 3: lose their their physical land.
Speaker 2: So that's anyone that owns land.
Speaker 3: As their religion. The bad good who cares. They're just
Speaker 3: not doing the religious function anymore. And in that sense,
Speaker 3: we are like an atheistic society but still very religious.
Speaker 3: Like as soon as you are allowed to just pick
Speaker 3: whichever religion you want off the shelf, like I watch last,
Speaker 3: I watched last Samuraise, So now I'm a Buddhist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the.
Speaker 2: Isn't that like that's kind of an animist.
Speaker 5: That's the that's the Japanese ancestor where that's.
Speaker 1: The folk religion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, is that a.
Speaker 5: Total it's it's a form of ancestral worship there. Like location,
Speaker 5: that's one of the location based things. I mean, I'm
Speaker 5: not an expert in any of this, but but in
Speaker 5: so far as Buddhism isn't really location based, right, you
Speaker 5: can do Buddhism anywhere. There's no mecca, there's no birthplace
Speaker 5: of Jesus.
Speaker 6: That it's it's.
Speaker 5: Kind of a if you have a statue and you
Speaker 5: can claim that it has antiquity and that it resembles
Speaker 5: the real Buddha. The if the what's his name, Shakya
Speaker 5: muna Buddha, like the real historical fifth sixth century BCE
Speaker 5: Buddha who is founded the religion. You say this is
Speaker 5: a likeness of that Buddha and it's the best one
Speaker 5: in the world. But I mean, every every Buddhist shrine
Speaker 5: that has a Buddha in it might make that claim anyway,
Speaker 5: but that's that's what gives it the authority. It really
Speaker 5: is a likeness of Shakimuna Buddha before pre transcendent. There's
Speaker 5: also transcendental Buddhist statues, but the Buddhas shaki Munas are
Speaker 5: supposed to be the likeness of the actual historical Buddha,
Speaker 5: not the transcendent Buddha you see sometimes. But and then, yeah,
Speaker 5: Shinto's kind of place based, right, because you'll have you'll
Speaker 5: have definite ties to two geographical locations in Japan. That yeah,
Speaker 5: that are important.
Speaker 6: There and that yeah.
Speaker 5: And it's interesting how how book culture then develops in
Speaker 5: Japan versus how it developed in the Gutenberg West as
Speaker 5: a result. But anyway, I'm going off top. I'm doing
Speaker 5: my bringing in too many ideas at the end.
Speaker 1: Thing again, well, I'm down to do Buddhism or and
Speaker 1: or the visible and the invisible, back to Ponty. Back
Speaker 1: to Ponty, but not not phenomenology.
Speaker 4: As an Orientalist podcast, we're gonna lead.
Speaker 2: Maurice sorry said we are.
Speaker 4: The officially officially orientalists, Save us China.
Speaker 1: Change the sub the subheading of pill Pot an orientalist podcast.
Speaker 4: We already half of it. We already at least half
Speaker 4: as I can. I can assure that much. I was
Speaker 4: always orientally Actually.
Speaker 2: Please please you.
Speaker 4: Save us, save us from occidental decadentes. Oh my god,
Speaker 4: nice to have you back, mister.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's good to see, and it's good that
Speaker 1: I'm happy to hear that you found that spiritual awakening.
Speaker 2: I hope I'm exuding inner peace.
Speaker 1: You are? You look you actually are? You actually do
Speaker 1: seem a bit more at peace?
Speaker 2: You do by my self help book on how to
Speaker 2: achieve inner peace.
Speaker 1: Sounds like you've been approached by publishers being like, please
Speaker 1: write something for us.
Speaker 2: Yes, but never on religion.
Speaker 3: I don't know if this stuck in your in your
Speaker 3: mind the way it did for me. But this is
Speaker 3: all back to like Durkheim saying, religion, God is a
Speaker 3: metaphor for society.
Speaker 2: That's that's all you need to know.
Speaker 4: What a gut punch.
Speaker 1: I love it.
Speaker 5: That's an interesting I mean, I'm not going to open
Speaker 5: up another vista here, but vista here. You know, well,
Speaker 5: I think there is some truth to that story if
Speaker 5: you've heard it right, that the that like the I guess,
Speaker 5: German idealism, rationalism, whatever, they just they just replaced God
Speaker 5: with reason and then reason became God basically. And I
Speaker 5: was reading first and even Charles Purse, a Victorian era thinker,
Speaker 5: I guess, and he said exactly this. You know, faith is,
Speaker 5: he says. He says, faith is being prepared to act
Speaker 5: or conform your behavior to something, but you're not really
Speaker 5: sure what it is. And he says, every scientist who
Speaker 5: reasons about things has faith that the world is governed
Speaker 5: by reason.
Speaker 6: He says, aka God.
Speaker 5: And I always think, okay, that's like this the deistic
Speaker 5: science of the deistic scientists, who you can be Newton
Speaker 5: and be totally a physicist, but then just say, oh well.
Speaker 6: Math is the language of God, so I'm religious too.
Speaker 5: But then the sociologists come in and want to say
Speaker 5: something totally different. The Dirkhims and the Freuds want to
Speaker 5: kind of say, oh, no, is this has the social function.
Speaker 6: Let's look at the social function.
Speaker 5: Which I'll admit is more interesting than just saying, oh yeah, God,
Speaker 5: reason is now God. What's the next God? Oh, it
Speaker 5: was like it's language after the linguistic turn, and and
Speaker 5: it's going to be something else in the future.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: The new God is going to be the Buddhist void.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't reason.
Speaker 3: Reason could never actually be a god for the masses,
Speaker 3: because the masses love they prefer to be stupid. This
Speaker 3: is this is Plato's complaint that there's always going to
Speaker 3: be few philosophers. And the reason really is that rationality
Speaker 3: and argument are not at all seductive.
Speaker 2: They're not to.
Speaker 3: Invoke, to invoke, Master Boudriard, they're not seductive. The king,
Speaker 3: the king returning on a horse to fight the dragon
Speaker 3: and kill the enemies.
Speaker 2: This is this is seduction, the.
Speaker 3: The viscerality of your soul being washed in the blood
Speaker 3: of the lamb, and the and the the windows and
Speaker 3: the ritual. This is what's seductive, and reason is just
Speaker 3: quite boring in comparison, which.
Speaker 1: Is why absolutely true.
Speaker 2: It can never become a mass mass adopted.
Speaker 1: Trump putting his arm up after doing that's seductive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, turning turning himself to into a jojob is our
Speaker 4: adventure any mail opening. But it's strange that in the
Speaker 4: era of like a predominant logic of productivity, we need
Speaker 4: to be seduced in order not to produce, you know,
Speaker 4: like like this disposition that is presented by Prodrigard, that
Speaker 4: seduction is opposed to production. And in a way, I think,
Speaker 4: like my takeaway from this conversation is that now I'm
Speaker 4: fully okay with believing. I don't care about no wing anymore.
Speaker 3: I mean, I wouldn't go that far, all right, that
Speaker 3: seems like a good place to uh wrap it up.
Speaker 3: I have to cut a whole bunch from the beginning
Speaker 3: when we're trying to fix our audio. So I'm hoping
Speaker 3: that this is long enough, but i think it'll be.
Speaker 1: A tight episode.
Speaker 4: Yeah, nothing is real.
Speaker 5: Natural belief, belief is okay. Knowledge is unnecessary.
Speaker 3: I think philosophy, all philosophy needs to be written as
Speaker 3: poetry because it's much more concise. There's material constraints, right,
Speaker 3: because paper is expensive two thousand years ago.
Speaker 5: Anyway, if religion satisfies that knowledge craving, then maybe we
Speaker 5: just need to get rid of that craving.
Speaker 2: Yeah, desire is suffering, see you guys.
Speaker 1: True